reporters-db 1.0.11

Database of Court Reporters

Background of the Free Law Reporters Database
=============================================

A long, long time ago near a courthouse not too far away, people started
keeping books of every important opinion that was ever written. These
books became known as *reporters* and were generally created by
librarian-types of yore such as `Mr. William
Cranch <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cranch>`__ and `Alex
Dallas <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_J._Dallas_%28statesman%29>`__.

These people were busy for the next few centuries and created
*thousands* of these books, culminating in what we know today as West's
reporters or as regional reporters like the "Dakota Reports" or the
thoroughly-named, "Synopses of the Decisions of the Supreme Court of
Texas Arising from Restraints by Conscript and Other Military
Authorities (Robards)."

In this repository we've taken a look at all these reporters and tried
to sort out what we know about them and convert that to data. This data
is available as a JSON file, and can be browsed in an unofficial CSV.

Naturally, converting several centuries' history into clean data results
in a mess, but we've done our best and this mess is in use in a number
of projects as listed below.

We hope you'll find this useful to your endeavors and that you'll share
your work with the community if you improve or use this work.

CSV
===

You can make a CSV of this data by running:

::

make_csv.py

We keep a copy of this CSV in this repository (``reporters.csv``), but
it is not kept up to date. It should, however, provide a good idea of
what's here.

Known Implementations
=====================

1. This work was originally deployed in the
`CourtListener <https://www.courtlistener.com>`__ citation finder
beginning in about 2012. It has been used literally millions of times
to identify citations between cases.

2. An extension for Firefox known as the `Free Law
Ferret <http://citationstylist.org/2013/08/20/free-law-ferret-document-to-cited-cases-in-a-click/>`__
uses this code to find citations in your browser as you read things
-- all over the Web.

3. A Node module called
`Walverine <https://github.com/adelevie/walverine>`__ uses an
iteration of this code to find citations using the V8 JavaScript
engine.

Some Notes on the Data
======================

Some things to bear in mind as you are examining the Free Law Reporters
Database:

1. Each Reporter key maps to a list of reporters that that key can
represent. In some cases (especially in early reporters), the key is
ambiguous, referring to more than one possible reporter.
2. Formats follow the Blue Book standard, with variations listed for
local rules and other ways lawyers abbreviate it over the years or
accidentally.
3. The ``variations`` key consists of data from local rules, found
through organic usage in our corpus and from the `Cardiff Index to
Legal Abbreviations <http://www.legalabbrevs.cardiff.ac.uk/>`__. We
have used a dict for these values due to the fact that there can be
variations for each series.
4. ``mlz_jurisdiction`` corresponds to the work that is being done for
Multi-Lingual Zotero. This field is maintained by Frank Bennett and
may sometimes be missing values.
5. Some reporters have ``href`` or ``notes`` fields to provide a link to
the best available reference (often Wikipedia) or to provide notes
about the reporter itself.
6. Regarding dates of the editions, there are a few things to know. In
reporters with multiple series, if multiple volumes have the same
dates, this indicates that the point where one series ends and the
other begins is unknown. If an edition has 1750 as its start date,
this indicates that the actual start date is unknown. Likewise, if an
edition has ``null`` as its end date, that indicates the actual end
date is either unknown, or it's known that the series has not
completed. These areas need research before we can release version
1.1 of this database. Finally, dates are inclusive, so the first and
last opinions in a reporter series have the same dates as the
database.

A complete data point has fields like so:

::

"$citation": [
{
"cite_type": "state|federal|neutral|specialty|specialty_west|specialty_lexis|state_regional|scotus_early",
"editions": {
"$citation": {
"end": null,
"start": null
},
"$citation 2d": {
"end": null,
"start": null
}
},
"mlz_jurisdiction": [],
"name": "",
"variations": {},
"notes": "",
"href": "",
"publisher": ""
}
],

Some notes on the ``state_abbreviations`` and
``case_name_abbreviations`` files:

1. Abbreviations are based on data from the values in the nineteenth
edition of the Blue Book supplemented with abbreviations found in our
corpus.
2. ``case_name_abbreviations.json`` contains the abbreviations that are
likely to occur in the case name of an opinion.
3. ``state_abbreviations.json`` contains the abbreviations that are
likely to be used to refer to American states.

Notes on Specific Data Point and References
-------------------------------------------

1. Mississippi supports neutral citations, but does so in their own
format, as specified in `this
rule <http://www.aallnet.org/main-menu/Advocacy/access/citation/neutralrules/rules-ms.html>`__.
Research is needed for the format in ``reporters.json`` to see if it
is used accidentally as a variant of their rule or whether it is an
error in this database.
2. New Mexico dates confirmed via the `table
here <http://www.nmcompcomm.us/nmcases/pdf/NM%20Reports%20to%20Official%20-%20Vols.%201-75.pdf>`__.
3. Both Puerto Rico and "Pennsylvania State Reports, Penrose and Watts"
use the citation "P.R."

Installation (Python)
=====================

You can install the Free Law Reporters Database with a few simple
commands:

::

sudo git clone https://github.com/freelawproject/reporters-db
python setup.py install

Once installed you can use it in your code with something like:

::

from reporters_db import REPORTERS

You can see all of the variables that can be imported by looking in
``__init__.py``. Other variables currently include:
``STATE_ABBREVIATIONS``, ``CASE_NAME_ABBREVIATIONS``,
``VARIATIONS_ONLY``, and ``EDITIONS``. These latter two are convenience
variables that you can use to get different views of the ``REPORTERS``
data.

Of course, if you're not using Python, the data is in the ``json``
format, so you should be able to import it using your language of
choice.

Tests
=====

|Build Status|

We have a few tests that make sure things haven't completely broken.
They are automatically run by Travis CI each time a push is completed
and should be run by developers as well before pushing. They can be run
with:

::

python tests.py

It's pretty simple, right?

Version History
===============

Past Versions
-------------

- 1.0: Has all common Blue Book reporters, with their variations from
the Cardiff database.
- 1.0.1

1. Bug fix after application to Lawbox bulk data
2. Updates cite\_type for better granularity and to eliminate a few
errors.
3. Adds WL, LEXIS and U.S. App. LEXIS as specialty\_lexis and
specialty\_west cite\_types.
4. ``fed`` cite\_type has been converted to ``federal``

- 1.0.2

1. Adds tests to verify the data (see ./tests.py)
2. Fixes a few data issues after applying tests

Current Version
---------------

- 1.0.9: Updates the mlz\_jurisdiction field to be state-specific, per
issue #1.

Future Versions
---------------

- 1.1: All dates are dialed in to the nearest year for every edition of
every reporter (some still require research beyond what Blue Book
provides). See `issue
#7 <https://github.com/freelawproject/reporters-db/issues/7>`__
- 1.2: All dates are dialed into the correct day for every edition of
every reporter.
- 1.x: International Reporters added?
- 2.0: Other features (suggestions welcome)?

License
=======

This repository is available under the permissive BSD license, making it
easy and safe to incorporate in your own libraries.

Pull and feature requests welcome. Online editing in Github is possible
(and easy!)

.. |Build Status| image:: https://travis-ci.org/freelawproject/reporters-db.svg?branch=master
:target: https://travis-ci.org/freelawproject/reporters-db